You find these untravelled critics and mischief-makers on both sides
of the Atlantic. In most cases they have no definite desire to work
harm, but they have inherited cantankerous prejudices which date back
to the American Revolution, and they lack the vision to perceive that
this war, despite its horror and tragedy, is the God-given chance of
centuries to re-unite the great Anglo-Saxon races of the world in
a truer bond of kindness and kinship. If we miss this chance we are
flinging in God's face His splendid recompense for our common heroism.

It is an unfortunate fact that the merely foolish person constitutes
as grave a danger as the deliberate plotter. His words, if they are
acid enough, are quoted and re-quoted. They pass from mouth to mouth,
gaining in authority. By the time they reach the friendly country
at which they are directed, they have taken on the appearance of an
opinion representative of a nation. The Hun is well aware of the value
of gossip for the encouraging of divided counsels among his enemies.
He invents a slander, pins it to some racial grievance, confides it
to the fools among the Allies and leaves them to do the rest. Some
of them wander about in a merely private capacity, nagging without
knowledge, depositing poison, breeding doubts as to integrity, and
all the while pretending to maintain a mildly impartial and judicial
mental attitude. Their souls never rise from the ground. Their
brains are gangrenous with memories of cancelled malice. They suspect
hero-worship; it smacks to them of sentiment. They examine, but
never praise. Being incapable of sacrifice, they find something
meretriciously melodramatic about men and nations who are capable. Had
they lived nineteen hundred years ago, they would have haunted Calvary
to discover fraud.

Then, there are others, by far more dangerous. These make their